The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) was established in 1948 by United Parcel Service (UPS) co-founder Jim Casey (1888-1983), along with his two brothers (George and Harry) and his sister (Marguerite), in honor of their mother, for whom they named the Foundation. Initially devoted to supporting child welfare and long-term foster care, AECF has evolved, over the decades, into an organization emphasizing multiculturalism and race-based programs intended to benefit nonwhite minorities. As David Hogberg of Foundation Watchwrote in 2012, the Casey Foundation “has taken a new direction during the nearly three decades since James Casey’s death.”

It is somewhat difficult to define, with precision, the late Jim Casey's politics. In Greg Niemann's 2007 book Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS, the author called Casey “conservative and far from radical.” Yet Niemann also noted that while most of UPS's founders “were primarily political conservatives, they adopted what could be considered today rather radical pro-labor ideas.” And David Hogberg, for his part, fleshes out the portrait of Casey:

“The Pacific Northwest of Jim’s early years had a robust social movement, and Seattle, where the Casey family settled, was already known across the country as a haven for left-wing politics. Activists called for the emancipation of the working class from the 'slave bondage' of capitalism. They wanted the working class in possession of economic power, to control business enterprise without regard to capitalist masters. This is the atmosphere in which Jim Casey matured. Remember, he was always watching. He couldn’t have helped but notice the unrest and reasons underlying the working-class argument. It’s an open question whether James Casey would support the current direction of the Foundation he established.”

AECF today professes a commitment to: (a) “developing a brighter future for millions of children at risk of poor educational, economic, social and health outcomes”; (b) “strengthening families, building stronger communities,... ensuring access to opportunity”; and (c) “influenc[ing] decision makers to invest in strategies based on solid evidence” regarding “what works.”

In practice, the Foundation generally favors a greater amount of centralized government control over such domains as the health care, employment, and personal incomes of American citizens. Thus it issues many grants designed to help federal, state, county, city, and neighborhood-based agencies create “more innovative, cost-effective responses to the issues that negatively affect children: poverty, unnecessary disconnection from family, and communities with limited access to opportunity.” As the Capital Research Center puts it: “The groups receiving Casey grants all say they want to help families with children. But what they most have in common is the desire to advocate for more government-sponsored welfare entitlement programs.... [The Foundation] now uses its grant dollars to support organizations that believe the best way to help children and families is to advocate for welfare assistance, job-training programs, public education, and other policies that make use of government mandates and tax dollars.”

In an effort to persuade political leaders, program administrators, the news media, and the American people to oppose any cuts in government welfare expenditures, AECF spent a number of years helping to bankroll Assessing the New Federalism, an Urban Institute research project that was launched in response to the welfare reforms that President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996. Between 2000 and 2012, AECF gave at least $17.5 million to this initiative, whose findings confirmed the Casey Foundation's bedrock belief that increased government spending and an expanded federal welfare bureaucracy are vital to the adequate funding of America's “social safety net.”

To address the problem of poverty (and its associated ills), the Casey Foundation in 1995 launched a “Jobs Initiative Program” to provide funding and support “for community-based initiatives” (in such fields as construction, healthcare, manufacturing, and teleservices) designed “to help young, low-income workers find meaningful jobs.”

On the premise that the federal government was doing too little to alleviate poverty in America, AECF in 2006 identified the “challenge of helping rebuild distressed communities” as its top grant-making priority for the immediate future.

Also in the mid-2000s, AECF oversaw initiatives that sought to: increase the pay and lighten the workload of social service employees; “improve the access of disadvantaged young adults to family-supporting employment”; provide mental health services and discussion-group forums "for children and families in disadvantaged neighborhoods"; fund "a wide range of organizations that work directly with disadvantaged children, youth, and families"; "improve housing and social and physical infrastructure"; and "increase public and private investment in [low-income] neighborhoods."

The Case Commons program aims to build a case-management system designed to help child-welfare agencies compile and analyze information and apply it effectively. Toward that end, this program has developed Casebook, a first-of-its-kind tool for the child welfare field.

(2) Juvenile Justice:

Since 2005, AECF and and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation have led a highly successful crusade to make the juvenile justice system increasingly lenient—even for the worst offenders. Rejecting the “get-tough-on-crime” approach that helped to dramatically cut crime rates nationwide beginning in the 1990s, Casey and MacArthur have: pushed for alternatives to incarceration for youthful offenders; opposed the practice of trying minors as adults; spearheaded the movement to abolish the death penalty for juveniles; and helped to almost entirely eliminate life sentences for young murderers. In addition, these Foundations have developed close relationships with the Obama Justice Department, where their views and strategies are highly influential.

Frowning upon incarceration as a means of motivating youthful offenders to reform their lives, AECF established its Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) in 1993 as a pilot project designed to: “decrease the number of youth unnecessarily or inappropriately detained”; “reduce the number of youth who fail to appear in court or re-oﬀend pending adjudication”; and “redirect public funds towards eﬀective juvenile justice processes and public safety strategies.” Founded on the premise that every stage of the juvenile justice system, from arrest through sentencing, is rife with racial injustice, JDAI says: “Nationwide, minority youth represent two-thirds of detained youth, but only about one-third of the total youth population.... It is impossible to talk about juvenile detention reform without talking about the disproportionate confinement of youth of color.”

Today the JDAI program is operational in 33 states and nearly 300 counties nationwide, where, as the Casey Foundation boasts, it has “dramatically reduc[ed] detention facility populations.” Indeed, JDAI measures its success by the degree to which detention rates of youthful offenders decrease where the program is active—on the theory that detention tends to turn young people into ever-more hardened criminals.

Building on JDAI's work in the field of detention reform, the Casey Foundation's Reducing Youth Incarceration (RYI) program strives to promote new state-level policies and practices that cut the number of youth placed into correctional institutions and other residential facilities. RYI does this by producing an array of issue briefs, policy reports, how-to manuals, and other materials designed to inform policymakers and juvenile-justice practitioners.

In 2006 the Casey Foundation issued a widely discussed report titled “Race Matters: Unequal Opportunity Within Criminal Justice,” which concluded that the U.S. justice system is rife with: “embedded racial inequities” that “work against women and men of color”; “racial stereotyping and discrimination”; “disproportionality at every step of the criminal justice process”; “statutory biases”; “poverty’s interaction with race in criminal defense”; “disproportionate imprisonment”; “differential post-release consequences”; “disparate impact on families and children”; and “disparate impact on neighborhoods.”

AECF and the MacArthur Foundation co-funded a study titled “Transfer of Juveniles to Adult Court: Effect of a Broad Policy in One Court,” which was published by the U.S. Justice Department in December 2012. Critical of trying youthful offenders as adults, this study found that:

“[T]he majority of youth transferred to adult court who return to their community resume some level of antisocial activity, and many are subsequently arrested or placed in an institutional setting.”

“Youth who associated with more antisocial peers resumed antisocial activity more quickly and were re-arrested more quickly than those who had more positive social relationships. This supports the general contention that juveniles, even serious offenders who are transferred to adult court, are highly susceptible to negative peer influences and outside pressures.”

(3) Kids Count:

AECF funnels a great deal of money to the Kids Count Network, a group of state-based child-advocacy and research organizations that use data to promote “smart policies” on a variety of issues including child welfare, juvenile justice, education, and economic opportunity. The Network's online KIDS COUNT Data Center features state and local statistics that track the well-being of children—as measured by hundreds of key indicators—over time and across geographical locations. This website is supplemented by the Foundation’s annual KIDS COUNT Data Book.

A highly noteworthy recipient of AECF funding was the Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund's “Half In Ten” Poverty Reduction Campaign, which collected some $218,000 from the Casey Foundation in 2010. “Challeng[ing]” America to cut its poverty rate in half by the year 2020, this Campaign’s seminal document was a 2007 CAP report titled “From Poverty to Prosperity,” which was produced by a task force co-chaired by Peter B. Edelman. Other members of the task force included national ACORN president Maude Hurd, AFL-CIO official Linda Chavez-Thompson, and Brookings Institution economist Alice Rivlin. Specifically, the report called for the minimum wage to be raised and then indexed to an hourly rate equivalent to half the national average; an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit; the enactment of the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act; taxpayer-funded child care assistance for all low-income families; and the reestablishment of federal Youth Opportunity Grants.

Not only did Half In Ten endorse the Edelman task force's recommendations; it also lauded President Barack Obama’s expansion of the Food Stamp program; supported Obama's expansion of unemployment insurance eligibility; claimed that a Republican budget proposed by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan would “harm our most vulnerable citizens”; and rejected a Republican bill designed to prevent welfare dollars from being spent in strip clubs, casinos and liquor stores. Half In Ten director Melissa Boteach described that bill as “yet another instance in the creeping trend of conservatives to demonize the poor.”

According to the Capital Research Center, “The [AECF] grant to Half In Ten illustrates how the Casey Foundation works: it promotes public policy research, cultivates grassroots and elite coalition-building, and develops an effective public relations program: groups and elected officials are urged to 'sign a pledge' committing themselves to the effort. The announced aim is to help the poor, but the practical effect is to fund nonprofit advocacy groups to build support for more government programs.”

The Evidence2Success initiative “helps identify problems and solutions” that have “proven” to be effective at helping children. Its principal tools include: (a) the Evidence2Success Youth Experience Survey, which provides public agencies and communities with a “big picture” view of how youngsters are doing and the challenges that influence their development; and (b) Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, which helps to “match” children’s individual strengths and needs with “cost-effective, evidence-based programs designed to help.”

The Casey Foundation's Leadership Development program uses an approach called “results-based leadership” to help professionals in nonprofits and public systems “make positive, measurable change for children and families, whether that means increasing the percentage of children ready to learn in kindergarten or decreasing the time young people spend in juvenile detention.”The Children and Family Fellowship program is a leadership-training initiative geared toward executives in “sectors working to improve outcomes for children, families and communities.” It uses group seminars and individual coaching to give trainees “the confidence and competence to lead major system reforms and community change initiatives that get results.”

AECF's grants in this area aim to “strengthen decision makers’ capacity to “promote the effective administration of essential safety-net programs proven to lift families out of poverty,” promote the expansion of refundable tax credits for low-income working families, improve access to federal child welfare benefits, and provide alternatives to youth detention and incarceration.